Is the history of the origin really dead?

Early in the life of Warren Buffett, his father was not hired at the family grocery store during the Great Depression. Unemployed, and without money after a run on the banks, the family of four ran a grocery bill at the store to put food on the table, and even then, his mother sometimes skipped meals.

From this nadir, the family has gradually gained a safer financial base. His father started a stock exchange and ended up becoming a four-term Congressman. Young Warren began to show an aptitude for numbers. He became obsessed with timing everything, calculating the odds, even counting the frequency of letters that appeared in the Bible most often, according to The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Case of Life . At the age of 15, he managed to earn thousands of work on his local paper route. The rest, as they say, is history.

Recently, the legendary investor, 87, has been surpbaded in wealth by Mark Zuckerberg, 34 years old. The gap was filled in part by the 15% increase in Facebook stocks this year, and in part by Buffett's large cash outflows.

Today, the three richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg, all made their fortune in technology

Compared to Mr. Buffett and many of his contemporaries, Mr. Zuckerberg's childhood was more commonplace. He grew up in Dobbs Ferry, a small suburb of New York's middle clbad, son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. He started using his father's computer at a young age and showed an early ease for programming, before graduating from an elite preparation school.

The story of Zuckerberg is typical of the list of technology billionaires newly minted in the ranks of the Billionaires Bloomberg Index. And there are many. With 64 businessmen and technology women on Bloomberg's list, which follows the 500 richest people in the world, the industry has produced more billionaires than any other (unless you count the legacies). This year alone, technology has created 11 new billionaires

But there is something missing in the fundamental stories of this new group of self-made men (yes, they are mostly men).

wrapped around paper paths and pathetic, today 's prototypical founding history involves a superior middle clbad childhood, early access to a computer, and an educational background. elite – even though this education has been abandoned.

Before leaving Harvard University Mr. Zuckerberg created an instant messaging system for his father's dental practice at the age of 12. At age 15, Twitter's Jack Dorsey dazzled his bosses during a programming internship. And Uber's Travis Kalanick was writing code in college.

The self-made man has always played a profound role in the North American imagination. Horatio Alger has written stories of brave and inferior wrestlers who have made their way into the world by dint of honesty and hard work. Hollywood has badized the oppressed since the movies were invented. And for years, the business world has also offered real stories

But the modern rise of the Harvard (or New York University) stall in the case of Mr. Dorsey or UCLA in the case of Mr. Kalanick) complicates this story. The founders of today have long been brilliant but short of hardships. After all, it's difficult to become a computer-free prodigy

. This accumulation of privileges reflects a more general trend of the US economy: for millions of low-income people, it becomes harder to build something. To leave Harvard, you have to go in first.

Mr. Buffett, with a political father and investor, often jokes that, despite the temporary poverty of the family, he won the "ovarian lottery". He will eventually attend the Columbia Business School and study with renowned investor Benjamin Graham

. For many leaders of Mr. Buffett's generation, the dormitories were not part of the original story. Consider Bruton Smith, who until his resignation as CEO of Speedway Motorsports Inc. in 2015 at the age of 88, was one of the oldest public company leaders in service. Mr. Smith grew up on a farm, never went to college and has already taken a shotgun on a construction site to settle a labor dispute. The oil baron Harold Hamm, born in 1945 as the youngest of 13 children of Oklahoma's sharecroppers, drilled his first oil well at the age of 25 (he finally paid for the # 39; s University). And then, Kirk Kerkorian, a recently deceased casino and movie mogul, was born in 1917. He falsified the documentation of a high school diploma in order to become a pilot in the military.

In a way, it's great to live the geek. And it's hard to cry the decline of Wall Street style corporate machismo. But a poor child growing up today can find it much harder to imitate the life path of someone like Mr. Zuckerberg, who coded an instant messaging system before puberty, than that. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in Brooklyn. projects and, at one point, served concessions at Yankee Stadium to earn extra money.

Statistically and anecdotally, the true stories of riches rags are becoming increasingly rare. Clbad mobility, as defined by the percentage of children who earn more than their parents, has been declining essentially uninterrupted since the 1940s. Economist Raj Chetty found that only half of the children born in 1980 exceeded the income of their parents. In 1940, this number exceeded 90%.

Of course, most successful entrepreneurs have incomes that far exceed those of their parents. In fact, they exceed the earnings of almost all humans in history. In now familiar statistics, the growth rate of income at the highest levels of income in the United States far outstripped growth in the lower segments (in the 1980s, it was the opposite, according to a study by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman). Last year, Oxfam International found that more than 80% of revenues were paid to 1% of the world's population.

The fact that so many new billionaires come from comfortable backgrounds is emblematic of a greater concentration of wealth. According to recent data from the Federal Reserve, the net worth of the median family had not regained its pre-recession value in 2016, while the richest 10% gained double digits since 2007.

Of course you can still find evidence Elon Musk, 47, an immigrant from South Africa, came from wealth but was bullied as a child before moving to Canada alone at age 17, where he enrolled at Queens University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, before finally dropping out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford University. Jeff Bezos, 54, was born when his mother was 16 years old and adopted by his second husband, a Cuban immigrant and an engineer. And Sergey Brin, 44, came to the United States at the age of six, when his parents exchanged the antisemitic backdrop of the Moscow University for a new life overseas.

But even these founders, who all had at least According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, the second oldest self-taught American billionaire is Richard DeVos of Amway, born in 1926. He was a boy when his father lost his job as an electrician during the Great Depression, and the family moved in with his grandparents. He remembered stuffing a baseball with fabric and tying him up because he and his friends could not afford to buy a new one. In second grade, he was labeled "no college equipment", sent to the business school, and had to work to return to the local Christian high school.

Ted Lerner, who at age 92 is the oldest self-made man on the Bloomberg index, is the son of a Palestinian clothing salesman. He grew up in an immigrant community in Washington and recalled in a local newspaper: "I remember that chickens were picked and kosher on Georgia Avenue." Sheldon Adelson, 84, now controversial in American politics, grew up in a -Clbad Boston neighborhood as the son of a taxi driver. Eli Broad, born in 1933, is the son of a Lithuanian house painter. He became the only man to found two Fortune 500 companies in two different industries: housing and financial services

. For lack of young technology luminaries that the economy has shifted to technological skills. While this has boosted Americans' standard of living, the rapid pace of innovation has made education an increasingly determinant factor of income, a trend that has exacerbated growing inequality .

70% of the adult population has still not finished school. It's even though higher education is becoming increasingly a prerequisite for white-collar work. The college wage premium, or what bachelor's degree holders do in relation to high school graduates, has exploded since the 1970s and now stands at around 50%, almost record levels.

The "digital divide" between rich and poor households has heightened the gap between the haves and have-nots. Despite the omnipresence of personal computing, poor children are less likely today to have access to programs that could help them develop an early coding genius.

According to Pew Research Center data, 87% of households have incomes of $ 75,000 or more. use broadband at home. But for households earning less than $ 30,000, it's only 45%.

This is not a lament of the comfortable childhood of today 's business leaders. In some ways, the American myth of the elite in search of nothing has always been mostly imagined. The probability of a child going from the lowest quintile to the highest salary is less than 10%. It's low compared to other rich countries, according to Chetty's data, but it has not changed much since the 1970s.

The American Dream has always been a story backed by the stories of Men who have grown from nothing to become tycoons. Today, Mr. Zuckerberg is a moral leader – a family man, and a donor to noble causes. But those looking to follow in his footsteps will take a look at his beginnings: at ease in Westchester's education, at the fencing club in an elite preparatory school and at carefree days. from Harvard.

Young people may aspire to climb the same ladder, but they will likely find that it is missing rungs.